Learn me: Smallish 4WD tractors like the Kubota B2650

I haven't been on the forum much lately, but I did buy 5 acres and a house with a garage. I finally have all the bikes and tools under one roof. There's 2 acres in the back where I intend to build a motorcycle playground. Mostly a pitbike track for my Honda Cub EZ90 and trials bike. I'll also be doing other tractor stuff like maintaining the gravel driveway, mowing the fields, plowing snow, you know, tractor stuff.

I'm inclined to buy used but I really feel a hydrostatic transmission is required for all the box scraper and loader work I'll be doing. Also, why don't tractors depreciate? A tractor a guy paid $15 for ten years ago is still worth about the same. I figure I might as well look at new. I did. They're available for 0% interest and 5-7 year terms.

I've pretty much lasered in on the Kubota B2650 with a skid steer quick attach bucket, a 60" box scraper and a 60" rotary cutter.

I've done a ton of research already. Anyone have any advice before I spend $20 grand on a tractor?

I am a Kubota fanboy, but a lot of people that do a lot of shopping end up with a Kioti.

My father bought almost that exact tractor in 1991. It's mowed a boatload of grass, run bush hogs, tillers, sickle mowers. It's on its second mower deck and I think it's been in the shop once for a clutch issue. Last I looked it had about 2800 hours on it and still gets the job done.

You really can't go wrong with a Kubota. Yes they are expensive, but you won't have to replace it in 5 years.

I've heard good stuff about Mahindra tractors. A lot of tractor for the money. They strike me as the KIA of tractors, whereas the Kubota is the Honda of tractors. Maybe worth a look comparison shopping, and what-not.

My Nortrac from Northern Tools is basically a brand new 1950's tractor, only diesel and 4wd. Manual everything except steering, but also supremely reliable. It's a 20hp and made by Jinma, and I only paid 6k for it used with 88 hours on it.

You used to be able to get new Jinma tractors in a crate with a loader and backhoe attachment for under 10k and finish the assembly and adjustments yourself, but ever since Mahindra bought them out I haven't seen those deals. At that price if you are mechanically inclined it was not a bad deal if you could swing it.

I think that's the exact tractor my dad bought a few years ago. It's pretty awesome and has been utterly flawless thus far. My dad likes it enough that it gets parked in the garage, while the rest of the vehicles are parked outside It replaced both a one or two size larger New Holland tractor (IMO the Kubota is better built) for plowing and heavier work, as well as a garden tractor that did lawn duties. I think it's just the right size for a do everything machine.

The resale on Kubota is better than any of the others. The other factor is will the company still be around in ten or twenty years? How many times have Kioti and Yanmar changed ownership, dealers, supply chain etc?

I just bought a tractor of that size. (3 series) I previously had a John Deere, but knew I didn't want to spend that much money again, but I did shop them too. After I'd shopped all the others so I would have a good comparison.

I thought I'd probably end up with a Kubota so I began there. They had some financing deals and were going to "throw in" a box blade too.

I forgot to say that I spend months looking at used ones of all brands and they were so expensive that I thought I might as well buy new and get a warranty and not have to worry about previous wear.

I seriously shopped Kioti, JD, New Holland, LS, & Mahindra, but I also looked at several others and dismissed them out of hand due to price, quality or just the fact they were unknown and so I worried about service.

What is the business end of the tractor going to be for you? The blade ended up becoming a very big bone of contention. The John Deere had a special proprietary attachment system and a very strong blade.

Most of the others used skid steer attachment points for their attachments which meant the world was your oyster as it meant you had lots of options and possibly some better pricing options (I've since found several used skid steer attachment places that will save me money on several other attachments such as a fork lift front end for $400 rather than $1,200)

The surprise weak brand was Kubota. Their blades were so weak that I found almost half the blades were bent in shipping or in assembly which made me worry about what else might be substandard.

Long story short I ended up with the LS brand. It seems almost all are Chinese or Korean, even the John Deere. And when I saw a picture of the LS and the New Holland (which was much more expensive) coming off the same line and the only difference was the branding & possibly the front hydraulics that's where I landed.

I got better front hydraulics and skid steer heavy duty bucket, a box blade and a 25 hp (above 25 hp demands a very expensive particulate filter system that costs between $1,000 - $2,000 periodically) all for $17,000.

Financing was 2%. I had originally thought I'd pay cash for a used one figuring I could buy one for $10k or less but many of the used ones were more expensive than the new ones.

Oh, make sure you get one that takes 5' attachments and not 4'. Lot's of 5'options but fewer and weaker 4' options

The rotary cutter you're talking about is attached to the 3pt on the back? Do you have a lot of trees on your acreage? I'm running a 60" mid mount mower deck on my JD4410 EHydro and have no issues mowing.

Oh, and don't forget to load the tires. They fill the tires up about 75% with water and antifreeze to balance the weight of what you have in the bucket and it gives you better traction all the way around. It's more stable on hills that way.

I intend to reinforce the lower edge of the bucket with a toothed cutting edge.

Plan is to use the box blade to scrape up topsoil and the bucket to move it to the corners and jumps.

The land has mostly been cleared of rocks, sage and juniper trees. There's still ten or fifteen of them but should be easy to mow with a rear mounted rotary cutter on the three point hitch. I mowed the fields with the previous owners craftsman tractor with a 42" deck but it took awhile. It's not like a golf course. It's the desert. Mowing on the highest setting and still hitting some gopher mounds making lots of dust. Probably only need to mow twice in the spring and twice in the fall. All dead during the fire season.

carguy123 wrote: Oh, and don't forget to load the tires. They fill the tires up about 75% with water and antifreeze to balance the weight of what you have in the bucket and it gives you better traction all the way around. It's more stable on hills that way.

Yup I'll be doing that. I'm going to test out using my spare air tank and windshield washer fluid on my lawnmower. The professional stuff is unnecessarily expensive it seems.

I'll also have a 4-500 pound box blade on the back for loader work.

Other times, I'm planning some pallet forks for the rear, and a 275 gallon pallet cage container thing. They're really common. I'm going to use one of those and a basic PVC manifold with holes drilled for watering the track. The full weight at 275 gallons plus apparatus would be about 2400 pounds. A touch over the rated capacity. I could fill it less than full or, and this is where I'm curious of those on the know, could I just lift the thing to full height and then fill? Would it support the weight? Might even throw a scoop full of dirt in the front end loader for balance. Then I could drive around the track to water it to keep the dust down and limit the annoyance to my neighbors.
I'm also intending to be able to enjoy riding my mountain bike around the track for quick exercise sessions after work without making noise our dust to annoy my neighbors.

Bears mentioning, I don't have very close neighbors. We're all on five acre plots and their houses aren't close. I just don't want to ride big bikes on the task and get shut down due to a noise complaint. I'm trying to be a good neighbor.

Instead of loading the tires, you can use wheel weights as most newer tractors do. It might depend on the size.

The fluid used is/was basically salt water.

Need a special pressure gauge. Won't corrode.

iceracer wrote: Instead of loading the tires, you can use wheel weights as most newer tractors do. It might depend on the size. The fluid used is/was basically salt water. Need a special pressure gauge. Won't corrode.

They don't use the calcium chloride anymore. They use a non corrosive, environmentally friendly solution that doesn't freeze. Cheap skates use windshield washer fluid.

The liquid gets the weight lower for a better center of gravity.

I bought a loader a few years ago- used Yanmar from the 1980's- Model 186D. 18HP, 4wd, loader, etc. Great tractor- paid about $4k for it with 1000 hours on it. It starts right up without even using the glow plugs.

We have 3 acres, some of it moderately hilly. The rear tires are filled with fluid but even still, I always just leave it in 4WD. I found that in 2WD, it's only mildly more useful than a wheelbarrow.

I couldn't justify spending 3 or 4x what I spent to get a new one. Especially when they have so much plastic on them and so much technology that's going to be likely to break in 5 years.

Mine has the interesting "Pow-R Shift" transmission. It has gears, not hydrostatic, but it's clutchless shifting. In my experience has been great. There's a learning curve to it, but it's every bit as useful as hydrostatic units. Supposedly they're pretty rugged, too.

Parts availability hasn't been awful- the internet can find just about anything, and a lot of the hydraulics, etc are serviceable by any generic hydraulic shop.

In the end...it's a tractor. Its a big heavy lump of iron that does unglamorous things and 99% of the time is just sitting under a roof collecting dust. Buy the biggest, best maintained, most rugged-looking rig you can find.

iceracer wrote: Instead of loading the tires, you can use wheel weights as most newer tractors do. It might depend on the size. The fluid used is/was basically salt water. Need a special pressure gauge. Won't corrode.

Actually most have quit using wheel weights as there are cracking issues. The weights, which are a pain to take on & off are usually used on larger tractors where they are on only a limited amount of time, such as when you change attachments often. I will leave the blade on all the time and use it mostly.

They don't use salt water anymore due to corrosion of the wheel. The only 2 solutions I found were an alcohol additive and an antifreeze additive. I went with antifreeze because I knew it wouldn't corrode the tires and it would protect the rubber. Alcohol shortens the life of the tires.

I have a friend that bought a Kubota a lot like that one about 5 years ago. It has taken a ridiculous amount of abuse and never missed a beat. Lots of land clearing, tree pushing, dirt moving, grading work with the box blade - it's been a beast. He did the water/antifeeze in the tires as well and it's worked well.

It's been a few years, quite a few since I last had anything to do with tractors, so I'm not up on the latest.

If things go as planned I may own one. Do they still have two brake pedals ?

Yes, but usually locked together.

If you get the hydrostatic transmission you hardly need it.

I thought I wanted the manual trans, until I used one. I kept forgetting to put in clutch and I kept hitting the wrong pedal. Too much to remember is you were in a jam and needed instant reversal to keep from sliding right down into the mud of your pond, which happened to me not 2 days after getting my tractor.

With the hydrostatic I was able to reverse it and stay out of the mud, but the thinking and reaction time on the other trans would have put me having to be pulled out and there would go my man card.

I will second the Mahindra suggestion. Mahindra is the Kia/Hyundai of the tractor world. For so many years people assumed they were bad because "korean" just like the Indiana Mahindra hasn't caught on, but Mahindra has decades of amazing experience with tractors. You can capitalize on a bulletproof tractor for a little less money than a Kubota if that's your game.

Kubota is pretty much the gold standard right now. I would put Mahindra right beside it. Many of the JDs are as well, but not quite the bang for buck as Mahindra.

Don't worry about resale on any of them. 75 years from now, any of them will be still working flawlessly and sell for more than you think.

I've lost touch with the newer stuff. Dad and I own 13 tractors ranging from tiny to huge and from 1928 to 1993. When you get to the smaller compacts, many companies are assemblers, not manufacturers. That Bota in the picture is a "real" Kubota. Some of the smaller ones are assembled from other manufacturers spec parts. They all do it. Kinda like the smaller JDs use a Kawasaki engine mated to someone else's hydrostat, then they put a pretty green paint job on it. Same thing happens with cars. A chevy truck is a chevy truck, but a Chevy Aveo is a Daewoo Lanos with some Russian Ravon Nexia and Chevy Cobalt parts thrown at it with a bowtie on the front.

With the tooth bar on my front end loader (JD4410 Ehydro) I've moved a ton of dirt. Not a big fan of a box blade....don't like turning around in the seat. I would and did save the money on that and got a 3pt backhoe from WoodMax. Best $4800 I've spent...redid my field lines for the septic and continue to dig stumps as we speak. Also very therapeutic when the rigors of daily life loom large. Some of us have never left the sand box.

Well I demoed a New Holland Boomer 24 for the weekend. Pretty nice little tractor. No ballast on the back or in the tires, so it was a little bit limited. I really need a box scraper to make some piles of topsoil to scoop up and then build the corners. Luckily there was a big dirt pile that we could scoop from already.

I towed it to the farm with Gertrude the Motovan.

I let my girlfriend try it out.

I let my friend with the other Honda Cub try it out.

I also let my brother take a turn or two on it.

I rinsed the dust off

and parked it for the final night at my place.

I returned it to the dealer this morning.

I went back to the Kubota dealer at lunch. I drove the L2501 around the parking lot again to test out the finesse of the loader. One of my dislikes on the Boomer 24 was that it only had a two range transmission. No power in high range and you had to have the engine spun up pretty high to go anywhere in low. Then the loader worked really fast. The loader control has a range of travel where it doesn't move very fast but it's a really small window and I was overcontrolling it quite a bit. The Kubota was so much better controlled. The Kubota also has high, medium and low. The low is really low, the medium is about like the low on the Boomer 24, and high was like high. Also, the mount for the loader joystick on the Boomer had a little bit of flex to it, so the handle moved a bit without making anything happen which made the loader action even harder. No problem on the Kubota.

The Kubota dealer didn't have a B2650 assembled, but they did have a B2650 and L2501 still in the crates parked right next to each other. I could really see the axle and frame size differences with the wheels off. It's obvious that the L weighs 2600 pounds and the B weighs 1800. There's a lot more steel in the L.

The best time to buy they said is at the Deschutes county fair, where they knock an extra thousand bucks off. Oh and by the way I think we have two L2501 tractors set aside for the county to use at the fair to pull wagons and garbage cans around. Yup right here, these two with the green tags are for the fair. We sell them at the end of the fair for even less money since they've got a few hours on them.

"Here's my business card, put my name on one of those and I'll pick it up after the fair."

My FiL bought a 2650 with EVeRY attachment a couple years ago. I've used it to trench new wiring for my water pump (then cover it back up), dig up some crushed tile from my septic system, rearranged the pallet rackIng in my barn, graded my driveway and mowed my lawn a couple times. It is awesome at everything it does.

Yes, get the bigger one. The one you were playing with only has a 4' blade and you'd be surprised how that limits you plus the bigger one you can buy all sorts of skid loader attachments at much cheaper prices than tractor attachments.

Now go save yourself $2,000-$4,000 and buy the LS instead. It's the same tractor coming off the same line at the same time, the only difference is the stickers they apply. That's what I did

I just picked up a used tractor myself after doing ALOT of the same research you did as well as "test driving" as many new and used machines as I could. I ended up with a John Deere 4300, not because I wanted a green tractor over a red, orange or blue one. We made the decision based on the extras that the JD came with. Now I have a tractor with a full Curtis hard cab with doors, front-end loader, 72" mid-mount belly mower, 50" 3-point rough cut mower, 60" front-mount PTO driven snowblower, 3-point ballast box and 448 frame-mount backhoe. I did the math and it was by far the best overall deal considering all of the attachments. Used Kubota tractors in my area are crazy expensive and it almost makes sense to buy a new one considering the attractive financing. I would have bought a new smaller unit if I planned on putting lots of hours on it, but since we only have 6 acres to play around with, a used unit will be fine. The only problem is, now that we have all of this new "stuff", I lost 2 garage spaces he at the house! The tractor with the FEL and backhoe takes up one stall and all of the attachments/implements take up the other!

From what I've seen, any of the hydrostatic tractors will do the job and it comes down to how different the hydraulics feel, how much HP they have if using them on property with a bit of elevation and what attachments you end up buying.

Good luck and welcome down another dark path. Cars, motorcycles, jetskis and now a tractor! I need another job!